When We Were Real (Author's Preferred Edition) (7 page)

I’m just a boy. I shouldn’t be here alone.

Then go back, Mother’s Son. Go back, while there’s still time.

Go back home to Mother and Dad, Rannvi and Lenahr, and all your little friends. Go back to Ludmilla Nellisdottir who loves you so. Go back and fall right through her beckoning gate to that... that...

I slid quietly from my hole in the wall, crept along the corridors, following the signs until I came to a forward obdeck. Stood by a curving wall of transparent metal. Watched quietly, gripping the rail with white-knuckled hands while teams of spacewalkers uncoupled
Sans Peur
from Audumla. Felt a soft vibration under my feet as field moduli counterlatched the substance of spacetime. Watched Audumla recede, a smooth stone cylinder turning on its axis, falling away, slowly at first, then faster.

Audumla. Ygg and its ruddy moons, become specks, then nothing. Nothing but the void and the faraway stars as
Sans Peur
accelerated on her way to Telemachus Major, four days travel time... twelve billion kems from home. Meaningless number. Meaningless word.

Another nightmare pang.

Orb telling me, down deep where it counts, that I have no home.

When I turned away from the star-spangled darkness, fantastically hollow inside, the obdeck was thronged with people. Some of them looking out at the stars, faces full of, I don’t know, longing, fear, exhilaration, peace, most looking away, at each other, at... whatever.

Not far from me a group of young men, boys my own age really, were hunkered down by the wall, making a little circle, intent. When I came up and looked, I could see they were shooting craps, a variant involving three eight-sided red dice. After I’d stood and watched for a while, they motioned me into play, speaking languages I didn’t know, obviously more than one language among them.

So I crouched and played for a long time, offering my chit for wagers, making my rolls, until I was so tired I could hardly see the spots on the dice. Came out a little bit ahead in the game too. Just enough. Not too much. Crept back to my little cubbyhole, where I thought about my new life, my new friends, my new everything, and finally went to sleep, where I dreamed about everything lost.

o0o

Four days later, I got one good view of Telemachus Major from space, standing in the obdeck with my new friend Hórhe as
Sans Peur
swept in from the interstellar deep, decelerating furiously, blue glow of the exhaust baffle wrapping around the hull like sheets of aurora at the poles of Ygg. It was a huge, blue-frosted sphere of a world, almost a thousand kems in diameter, I remembered from the atlas, air contained at its surface, contained and conditioned by a vast eutropic shield absurdly expensive to maintain. Artificial world with artificial mountains, artificial seas, artificial clouds...

I spied a much smaller world, a little sphere of bright green, apparently in orbit around Telemachus Major, maybe only a hundred kems across, maybe less. I’d learned a little Sinyól from Hórhe these past few days, just as he’d learned a little Norn from me, so I said, “
Ke es la verdád
?”

He snickered and said, “What is truth?”

Um. How many words of a language can you learn in four days, even when it’s obviously related to your own? Not many. I pointed at the little world and said, “The green thing.”

“Green?
La vérde
?”

“I guess so.”

“Telemachus Minor.
Es la párke
.”

While we were talking, trying to talk anyway, Telemachus and its moon swelled in the window, becoming so huge it was impossible to believe it
wasn’t
a real world, that we weren’t bearing down on manhome Earth itself. How would I know? I’ve never really seen a real world, other than Ygg. What’s it like to come in for a landing on an object eight thousand kems across, with a natural atmosphere deep enough to swallow Audumla?

But we passed close to the little green worldlet on our way in, and you could see, see with your naked eyes, that it was a world of trees. I had one long moment of memory, remembering my last hunting trip, walking through the abandoned woods of Audumla, imagining myself on Earth. How much easier that dream would be on a place like this.

o0o

So we landed,
Sans Peur
settling down in a vast, oval depression atop a grassy mountain somewhere on Telemachus Major, and I stood frozen by the obdeck rail, looking out at my new world. Grassy mountain slopes, then... horizon line in all directions, and buildings, cityscape everywhere I looked, buildings leaning away from me, leaning giddily, letting me know I was on the
outside
of a sphere. Overhead, blue sky, fluffy white clouds, clouds floating on the wind.

How can this
not
be the doing of Uncreated Time? How can mere men have made such beauty?

No answer.

Hórhe poked me in the shoulder, made me look down at his smiling, flat tan face and beady black eyes. He held out his hand to me and said, “I got to go, Murph. Was nice meeting you.”

I took his warm hand in mine, suddenly fearful. What was it he’d taught me to say? “
Asta la vísta, Hórhe
.”

He looked at me, shrugged, and said, “Maybe so, Murph.” Then he let go of my hand, turned and walked away into the crowd, and of course I never did see him again, went walking away, on my own, missing him already, it seemed, in just the same way I missed Styrbjörn and the others.

All the others.

They’d filled my time, filled my life, kept me from... whatever it is friends keep you from.

Maybe just keep you from thinking about the meaning of the words you say.

Time turned kaleidoscope on me after that. With nothing to retrieve from my room, owning nothing but the casual clothes I’d put on when I came down to breakfast, that and my father’s chit, I walked as slowly as I could down through the bowels of the ship, down to the axial corridor, then forward to the docking port and on out into Telemachan daylight. Stood standing under that blue and white sky, motionless, in the dwindling crowd of travelers, finally became aware of three men standing before me, tall, dark men, just like me.

One of them said, “Mr. Murphy?”

I started, jerked from a contentless reverie, and looked at them, switching from face to face. “Yes.” More afraid than I ought to be. Too much. Too soon.

The man said, “We’re friends of your father. My name’s Cyraxidon.” Speaking Norn rather slowly, with a pronounced accent of some kind.

I said, “I can speak Parthava.”

A smile. “Usually we don’t. Just at home, in the Firehall, in private. You know any classical languages?”

“English and Chinese. I’m, uh, not very good with languages.”

He said, “You’ll do fine, Murphy. English is popular with the big companies. Chinese’ll come in handy as hell if you wind up working for one of the tongs.”

Tongs. I didn’t have a clue to what he was talking about. I let them lead me away, down into a city made of tall, very old-fashioned buildings, down through something they called a
ginza
, beyond into something else called a
barrio
, where the buildings were not so tall and definitely... inelegant.

Finally led me to something they called a flophouse and put me in a dirty little room, a room without windows, making sure though that I noticed there was a lock on the door, that I knew how to use it. There was an antique freeze-frame in the corner, next to the bed, freeze-frame with a little slot in its base where I’d have to put my chit if I wanted to use it. A little box of a sideroom with a toilet and shower, each with a chitslot as well.

Then the man who called himself Cyraxidon said, “We’ve... arranged for you to take some tests, Murphy. We’ll help as much as we can, but...” He looked at the others, all their eyes hooded and secret. “Well, you get some rest now. We’ll see you again in a day or two.”

Then they left, leaving me there all alone.

A day or two?

And what the hell am I supposed to do in the meantime?

After a while of staring at nothing, I put my chit in the freeze-frame’s slot and watched this old clunker light up. Put my hands through the interface and felt the datatracks begin to stream. Made a connection to HytaspesMurphy.Helgashall.Audumla and...

Address rescinded.

Felt a little crackle of anger.

Made another connection to Goshtasp.HelgaBiz.Audumla and...

Address rescinded.

HytaspesMurphy.Audumla.TimeLine.Universal...

Audumla.TimeLine link severed.

An impossible gulf seemed to open. One runaway boy and...

I connected to RannviHelgasdottir.Helgashall.Audumla.

The freeze-frame filled with light, then a ghostvoice said, This address has been sequestered against certain external links in accordance with DataWarren Policy Issue 400.1. Further connection attempts will result in a fine levy at account Murphy.TelemachusMajor.TimeLine.Universal.

I switched to annonymous mode and got the standard message about the address not accepting anonymous calls.

Then the light went out.

Numb, I withdrew my hands from the freeze-frame, pulled my chit and watched the interface die.

o0o

What I did, with my little snippet of time on Telemachus Major, on those days and days between meetings with Cyraxidon, between trips to various entities called Human Resources and Personnel and Employment Security, between shadow trips to rich, fat Timeliners with something called
contacts
, was explore. Picture a rube from the provinces, rustic with bits of straw protruding from his clothes, rubbernecking the skyscrapers, ogling the crowds, wondering where the hell all these people, all these buildings, all of
this
had come from.

At some point, regenerated or remembered, I considered the datum that five billion human beings lived here on this little world. Little. Hell. I could pick any direction. Any direction at all. Walk for 3,141.59 kems, and here I’d be, right back where I started. But, all the while, the crowds made me realize what five billion people meant.

It was a beautiful world, with its endless cityscape of marble and granite, classical buildings with tall, fluted columns, domes of alabaster, silver and gold... faraway mountains, blue in twilight, though there wasn’t a trace of either stemshine or natural sun in the sky, stars washed away, but for the barely perceptible twinkle of Alpha Cee, A and B, one almost bright, the other quite dim. Broad white beaches, beaches of shallow tide and gentle surf, thronged with naked men and women, at once familiar and strange.

I saw a man like an elephant.

A woman who looked like some kind of huge, upright black spider.

One day, not long after I’d taken the entrance examination battery for employment with Standard ARM, I found a complex of beautiful old buildings, red brick, white trim, plain cylindrical columns like pillars of iron, something called the Museum of Natural History, maintained by the Telemachus Major Chamber of Commerce.

Went inside. Wandered for a while, as if lost. Saw a real elephant. real but stuffed, dead since the days, a thousand years gone, when there were no spaceships and humans lived only on manhome Earth. Saw a model of a something called a blue whale, leviathan from the terrestrial deeps hanging like a vast ghost from the ceiling, thirty ems long if it was a cem, extinct.

After a while, I found a pretty blond girl named Cindy, an average model human dressed in white shorts and halter top, barefoot, toes so straight and flat, so unprehensile, I wondered how she could walk. She smiled and chatted me up, found out who I was and where I was from, told me she was a museum docent and took me on the tour.

For some reason, I felt very comfortable with her. Maybe just the fact that she talked to me, smiled at me, sought me out, instead of wait for me to act in her stead.

That felt familiar, among all the strange new things of this strange new world.

Comfortable.

She showed me a burnt little ball with a puppet man inside,
Vostok 1
and Yuri Gagarin. Made me imagine his awe as he looked out his tiny porthole at rolling Earth below. Showed me a spidery, gold-foil spaceship so fragile it made my heart rise in my throat, two clumsily spacesuited men on simulated Luna before it, Buzz and Neil, coming in peace for all mankind.

Let me look through a dramatized sampler of the popular fiction of those long-gone days. Could they really have expected to go from
Apollo
on the Moon to
Discovery
at Saturn in only thirty-two short years?

The movie seemed so agreeably stupid.

Naive in an unfamiliar way.

Showed me the statue of Lydia Brentano, PhD, standing on red-rock desert before the debarking ramp of
Hope
’s lander, a lifetime late, and made me wonder again at the long gap between Luna and Mars. Showed me the tall, elegant statue of Gem Dragovich, who, one fine day not quite five hundred years ago, hijacked Standard ARM Cargo Engine #164, dumped its payload and accelerated in the direction of Alpha Centauri. Accelerated until he was out of fuel.

Historians agree that, without him, we might have stayed home forever.

And still argue about whether that might not have been a Good Thing.

The statue looped out Gem’s final message, masered back from a distance of almost sixteen light years, reporting on a few new objects he’d spied as he drifted away from Sol and humanity’s little sphere, noting that his medprobes could do no more, that they were letting him die, and now it was up to the rest of us, now that he’d shown the way. After he was dead, they renamed his ship
Forerunner
, and the exhibit has a live radio link, so you can listen to its faithful telemetry song, whispering back across the gulf between the stars, 120 light years and counting.

That same day, I went to a public freeze-frame and pushed in my chit, made the link to Standard ARM Human Resources Division, feeling a slight, warm prickle of alarm as my test scores slid up. Stood for a long, hollow second looking at the contract they offered. Flight engineer. All right, I know what that is, know why I’m qualified. But what can a Deep Space Rescue Vehicle be?